Carthage

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December 12, 2002

Stop Thinking About Sex

A while ago I started taking pictures of sidewalk stencils. It started with the two photos Michele gave me of two different Monkey Knife Fight stencils we saw on my birthday. After that I started noticing all the different ones around my neighborhood: "Stop Thinking About Sex," "Save The Sewer Rat," "Don't Buy the HIV Lie," etc. It's the perfect project for someone like me, who is so paralyzed by the fear of being looked at by other people that it's often difficult to leave my apartment; this way, I can just stare at the ground as I walk and not risk meeting anyone's eye.

Of course, once I actually find one of these stencils, it's for the same reason really difficult to do something so attention-grabbing as taking a photo of the ground. Often I wind up noting it for later and coming back in one of my rare brave moments, or when I have someone else with me. (It's only alone that I get freaked out like this.) So the project is progressing very very slowly.

It reminds me a lot of one of the projects Frahm was working on when I met him. He was making a series of paintings, all in yellow paint and black marker, of transportation systems. He was really obsessed by stuff like the cables for MUNI trains (I know, no one calls them trains), and the weird hive-like walls of the Civic Center stop. The projects are about equally useless, I'd say.

I wonder if I'm going to eventually turn into some odd indie-everything person like he was, wearing the thick glasses and black hoodie or blue nylon jacket which is that person's uniform, squirreled away in my city home glueing toothpicks into a space station for Barbie dolls, emerging only to drink in cavelike bars with others of my kind, or to procure more pot or vinyl. Occasionally I'll hit a show and stand stoic in the back, retiring afterwards to another dive bar to discuss how Nick Drake did it better. I don't really know how my 19 year old self wound up haunting that scene, chirping around like Pollyanna and unabashedly listening to Matchbox 20. I hope this new sidewalk project won't make me suddenly more fit for the indie life: misanthropic, apathetic and derisive.

Posted by didofoot at December 12, 2002 12:39 PM

Comments

tell you what. if you actually MAKE sidewalk stencils...

if you were to say, cut the words "die indie boy die" and maybe some spectacles with x's for eyes, into the bottom of a safeway paper bag, and then to put a spraycan in that bag, and to carry it around at night--
--when only the crazy ladies will look at you, and you can look bravely back--
--and MAKE words, then you will feel anthropic, joyful, and, um, risive, as per your concerns.

Posted by: ways to be happy at December 12, 2002 01:58 PM

isn't Matchbox 20 anti- indie rock?

Posted by: brian at December 13, 2002 08:51 AM

so, i was talking with my friend "John" last night and he said he's witnessed numerous debates over whether absurdist sidewalk stencils like Monkey Knife Fight are detrimental to "the movement"! because, of course, there is a Bureau of Meaning and Crimespeak to ban unsafe usages of rebel tactics and simian referents.

and i said, The Squares Can Kiss My Pear, and also, There is nothing more liberatory than symbols divorcing the signified, and finally, We should show up at their homes in ape suits.

with machetes. Free yourself from the shackles of signification!

Posted by: lacatie at December 13, 2002 11:27 AM

If it makes you feel any more (or less) indie, I still regularly scrawl "Trolls for Freedom, Freedom for Trolls" onto public surfaces when I think I won't get caught.

Posted by: sean at December 13, 2002 03:15 PM

i was told there would be no semiotics involved.

Posted by: jack derrida at December 13, 2002 04:18 PM

l'arson, be honest, are you responsible for the newly sprayed (sprain?) square on the block of 18th and valencia that reads,
JUNKY
WIFE
BITE
?

that meme was becoming a mega-meme, sort of a trans-national corporate takeover branding strategy, and it was totally time to bring it back home with some obscuro-irono-clast, post-punk-dustrial parody realism. good work.

and right on Jack Ian with the po-mo (po-stro, for post-structuralist?) presence...not that we'd expect less from the perpetrator of the famous DFW fiasco, of this site a fortnight ago. you all rock. now, if you'll excuse me, my japanese toothbrush is calling.

Posted by: jenny dean at December 15, 2002 02:59 PM

Hyphens are nearly as lazy as those corporate fatcat(t)s who want to drink capitalist nectar from your socialist pistils and/or stamens.

Am I getting the Hang of This?

Posted by: sean at December 16, 2002 12:48 AM

ok, can i say? that i was like, totally just kidding? about the hyphens and stuff? and that, like, i think you took me too sarriously? i mean, sarriously! i'm, like, totally not a socialist, you like, motherfucker. i mean, dude. like fucking, lose the irony

Posted by: mockingbird at December 27, 2002 10:03 PM

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